When Moses and his people left Egypt and slogged north out of the Sinai, the horizon was filled with the intimidating mountains of Edom. The lands east of the Jordan River were occupied by a suite of inter-related tribes, Edom, Moab, Ammon, and Aram from south (near present-day Aqaba) to north (modern Syria). The Israelites were unable to make a deal with the Edomites (Judges 11:17 also reports that Moab refused) to allow peaceful passage, triggering the 40 years of wandering dues they had to do pay before settling down.
Anyway. Remember from earlier lessons that intricate and intimate interactive (alliterative enough for you?) relationship between economics and ecologics that together define, control, and constrain the biosphere in this present Age of Man? Well, it devolves that the foundational nature of oikos nomos and oikos logos were among the key issues that cratered the deal being negotiated between the Israelites and the Edomites, which is one of the pivotal moments in human history.
The Book of Numbers 17 reads (in one English translation): “Let us pass, I pray thee, through thy country: we will not pass through the fields, or through the vineyards, neither will we drink of the water of the wells: we will go by the king's high-way, we will not turn to the right hand nor to the left, until we have passed thy borders…”.
The King’s Highway exists and is an important thoroughfare today. It winds mostly along the top of the ridge of the mountains running north/south along the Jordan Valley. For speedy travel from Amman to Aqaba, a modern, high-speed authobahn has been constructed on the flatlands to the east. But the King’s Highway is as viable now as it was in the time of Edom.
I had the privilege once of seeing the Israelite’s view of Edom, when I was working on the UNCC claim for the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Our driver took us north from Aqaba along the roadway in the dry southern riverbed, and as soon as you pass the coastal hills, the mountains are in your path.
This is harsh desert country. Life-support natural resource services are hard to come by. Religion, sociology, and politics (none of which I understand in any useful way) aside, it was ecologically and economically a nontrivial matter to consider adding the stress of a large group of refugees and their livestock to the ecosystem, even for a short time.
Millennia later, the refugee scenario played out in fact in the ancient tribal lands. Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 triggered the departure of hundreds of thousands of people, many of them foreign workers. They dispersed primarily west and south, many made their way to Jordan where accommodation was made by adding to the infrastructure of the refugee towns already occupied by Palestinians, or where they could hope for sea passage via Aqaba.
The load on the ecosystem was substantive. Nonreplenishing aquifers were tapped, existing aquifers were further depleted. Surface water supplies were overwhelmed. The simple physical passage of large numbers of people played havoc with the desert soils. In many places, the thin layer of organically active and important surface soil was broken, promoting erosion and exposure of the underlying mineral pavement. Livestock moved with some of the refugees, and the flora of remote areas of the desert was decimated.
In Aqaba, the coastal strand and aquatic ecosystems were impacted in complex ways. Physical damage to the dunes and the beach was still obvious when I visited years later. In addition, the fringing reefs had been fragmented and eroded, grated and scraped by small vessels coming and going and the waves generated by larger vessels passing through to the port. The nearshore use of the thousands of people who spent time in the beachfront camps left visible injury on the landward side of the reef structure. Authorities documented a number of petroleum spills, cleanup at the time was minimal.
Public health is intimately linked to ecosystem health, and the refugee crisis in Jordan reflected that as well. Overall, salt levels in drinking water rose, diet quality fell, and infectious disease rates climbed probably as a result of both importation and increased population densities.
Ecosystem change is slow in the desert. It will be a long time before much recovery takes place, and some of the impacts are essentially permanent. Of course, none of this provides useful quantitative insight into the standoff between the Israelites and the northern tribes. Environmental and social conditions were different, population levels much lower, and the kinds and levels of impacts not comparative. But it does suggest that ecosystem stewardship has been a human concern for a long time, that such concerns are knotted up with our social and religious lives, and that armed conflict has been a factor in our environmental relationships for as long as we’ve been a cogent species.
Notes
“A hungry mob…” From the song “Them Belly Full” by Bob Marley. Many versions available. A particularly good one is on the recent album “Live Forever: The Stanley Theater, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, September 23, 1980” a recording of Marley’s last concert before his death from cancer in 1981.
Israelites and Edomites. Some of the negotiation is reported in the Bible, in the Book of Numbers. A nice [if a bit difficult for a non-believer…or maybe it’s just THIS non-believer… to follow the complexities of different translations, cross-references, and arcane sources] and rather comprehensive analysis of the various available texts of the incident is available here:
http://biblebrowser.com/numbers/20-21.htm
William Henry’s commentary (same site) reads: “…that they would commit no trespass upon any man's property, either in ground or water, that they would not so much as make use of a well without paying for it…”. And Calvin: “…And the children of Israel said unto him, We will go by the high-way; and if I and my cattle drink of thy water, then I will pay for it: I will only (without doing any thing else) go through on my feet.”
Credibility alert: much of what is reported at this site matches information from other sources, but be aware that I have not done any meaningful quality and accuracy check of the content.
Economics and ecologics. To refresh your memories I include an annotated Power Point presentation on this topic with the week’s upload package. This one may very somewhat from the stuff I provided earlier, but the fundamentals are unchanged).
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